Today, plain-paper Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) technology uses pattern recognition to automatically find response bubbles to determine the intended responses. Traditionally, response bubbles only had two intended responses—filled and unfilled. Response bubble attributes of the filled and unfilled bubbles would be compared, and a fill status would be determined with the corresponding response assigned to that bubble. Prior art FIG. 1 shows an example of a plain-paper OMR form. One limit to this technology is that it only allowed for the two possible outcomes.
This deficiency was addressed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,555,145 (Holenstein et al.) which provides multi-level OMR. Multi-level OMR allows an unambiguous symbology of marks to be defined for filling into each bubble that will allow a plurality of non-empty intended responses. The completed response forms are electronically imaged and processed using a scanning system. The forms can be imaged in a number of ways, such as by scanning or taking an image with a digital camera. The software itself may operate on many different types of systems, including on a desktop computer, built into a peripheral like a multi-functional device, or on a mobile smartphone. Once the form is electronically imaged and sent to the scanning system, the scanning system interprets the response bubble attributes of the filled in response bubble to associate a raw score with the response bubble that corresponds with one of the marks defined in the unambiguous symbology of marks. This allows respondents to have multiple ways to respond to each response bubble, allowing more information to be gathered in smaller spaces on the response forms. Examples of the response bubble attributes that can be used include color, density, shape, fill value, and line orientation. Part a. of prior art FIG. 2, part a. shows a symbology in which an entire scale from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” can be interpreted based upon the orientation and fill value of a mark. Part b. of FIG. 2 shows a symbology where an “ignore” state can be determined based upon the shape and density of the mark. Part c. of FIG. 2 shows a symbology where “present”, “tardy”, “sick” and “absent” can be determined based on the color of the mark.
One of the biggest challenges facing any OMR technology is that respondents rarely make their marks in the same way. Some may not fill the response bubble completely, or some might even fill in a response bubble with a line or checkmark or some other kind of mark. Multi-level OMR solves these issues to an extent, but even with the pre-defined unambiguous symbology of marks, respondents still will vary in how they reproduce the mark symbols or may wish to define their own symbologies.
Additionally, when processing a form that uses multi-level OMR, the scanning system needs to have the unambiguous symbology of marks defined before processing the form. This means that in order to process a batch of forms using multi-level OMR, all of the forms must adhere to the same unambiguous symbology of marks, and if a form uses a different unambiguous symbology of marks, then it has to be processed in a later batch with that unambiguous symbology defined.
Technology exists to process a batch header and prepend the information to each form in a batch of completed response forms being processed after the header. Prior art FIG. 3a shows a sample batch header to be used with a sample exam form in FIG. 3b. The batch header is first completed with information about the class code, instructor, and the like. The students then complete the exam form. When the forms are being processed, the batch header is processed first followed by the completed exams. The data from the batch header is then prepended to the data from each completed exam form in the batch. However, this prior art technique does not include a way in which the unambiguous symbology for the batch can be defined on the batch header.
What is needed is a method where the unambiguous symbology of marks can be interpreted during the processing of the form instead of needing to be defined beforehand. This would allow forms using different unambiguous symbologies of marks to be processed in the same batch, and at the same time allow respondents to define their own unambiguous symbology when filling out response forms.